The story of the Gulag is an immense topic. The written record of this vast
slave-labor network is incomplete. More information about the Gulag’s past
is now starting to appear, but there are still great gaps in its history.

The problem begins with the lack of clarity about the Gulag itself. It was a
hidden system. We only have approximate estimates of the size of the Gulag
and the number of its prisoners. The Russian researcher Galina Ivanovna
says:

to date, Russian historians have discovered and
described 476 camps that existed at different times on the territory of the
USSR. It is well known that practically every one of them had several
branches, many of which were quite large. In addition to the large numbers
of camps, there were no less than 2,000 colonies. It would be virtually
impossible to reflect the entire mass of Gulag facilities on a map that
would also account for the various times of their existence.1

The term “GULAG” is merely the Soviet acronym forthe Chief
Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, but the word “Gulag” has come to
represent the entire Soviet prison and camp system. The Gulag’s origins date to
1919 under Lenin. The first camp was Solovki, where prisoners were first sent in
1920. The GULAG as an administrative body itself was created in 1930. It was
part of the OGPU (the Unified State Political Administration), the name for the
secret police in the 1920s and 1930s.2 The
regime kept the Gulag a secret and even denied its existence.3
It used the term “corrective labor camps” as a camouflage and euphemism.

The Gulag economy was massive, comprising at least twenty
branches of industry. A very important responsibility was construction: “forced
labor was used on practically all of the large-scale construction projects of
the Stalin years.”4 Perhaps even more important
was the mining of raw materials and the secret development of atomic weapons.

The topic of Gulag unrest and revolts is also largely an
unknown and hidden topic. We only have sketchy accounts of the revolts. Even the
best accounts are fragments of the full
story. The historical literature on the uprisings at present is
very unsatisfactory and in need of much work.5

The presence of Baltic nationals throughout the Gulag is
also a significant topic. Since 1990, significant work has been
done on this question. This study is an attempt to describe
one aspect of the history of Baltic forced laborers in the Gulag
– namely the extent of their participation in the great uprisings
in the Gulag in 1953.

Background

1953 was a remarkable year in the history of the Gulag. That year the Soviet
leadership was faced by major rebellions at three camp complexes: Karaganda,
Vorkuta and Norilsk. These dramatic revolts, the details and scope of which are
still not well known, shook the foundation of the Soviet system. These events
have special importance to the Baltic States because many Latvians, Lithuanians
and Estonians were imprisoned in these camps and because Baltic nationals took a
prominent part in the revolts. Baltic prisoners were also among the casualties
when the revolts were brutally suppressed.

The revolts were staged by prisoners, unjustly arrested and
sentenced to slave labor in the Gulag. They were from many different
nationalities. Demanding better conditions and fair treatment, they refused to
work until conditions improved. Their decision to strike threatened the basis of
the Stalinist economy, which relied heavily on slave labor. The Norilsk complex
produced nickel, platinum and many other highly valued metals. The Vorkuta mines
provided one-twelfth of the entire coal production of the USSR and the entire
supply for Leningrad. Karaganda produced coal and copper, as well as other
valuable resources for the Soviet system.

The historic significance of the revolts, half a century
after their occurrence and fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet
Communist system, is considered by both experts and participants to be of great
significance. Survivors of the revolts regard them as a clear sign of the
long-standing internal opposition to the Soviet Communist system. The scholar
William Pederson refers to the Norilsk uprising as the first major revolt of the
inmate movement that swept through the Soviet labor-camp system from 1952 to
1954.6 John Noble, an American who survived the
Vorkuta uprising, called it the “Great Vorkuta Slave Rebellion.”7
Janis Zile, a Latvian participant in the Vorkuta revolt, said that it proved
that the prisoners were able to unite against an “inhumane system.”8
Solzhenitsyn viewed it as a sign that the Stalinist camp system, particularly in
the special camps, was nearing a crisis. While he was the first to point this
out based on fragmentary information, two decades later, scholars like Marta
Craveri and Oleg Khlevniuk have confirmed his analysis of a crisis in the Gulag.9

The protests by the prisoners, like other such events in
Soviet history, were met by brutal force and bloodshed directly ordered by the
highest Soviet officials. Those responsible for the killing of unarmed prisoners
include some of the most prominent members of the Soviet legal, police and
military
structures.

What follows is a narrative of the role of Baltic peoples
in these events. This study describes the extent of Baltic population in the
Gulag, the interrelationships of Baltic prisoners, the role of Baltic nationals
in the uprisings, and the impact of the suppression of revolts on Baltic people
in the Gulag. Also included is a survey of the influence of religion and the
work of priests and ministers in these camps.

The world learned of the revolts chiefly from surviving
prisoners who reached the West. The initial story of the revolts comes from the
accounts of prisoners of Baltic and other nationalities. These include Janis
Simsons, a Latvian; John Noble, an American; and Josef Scholmer, a German, to
name a few. Also important was Adolfs Silde’s remarkable account, The Profits
of Slavery, which was based on interviews of returning prisoners, mostly
Germans. Subsequent accounts by survivors – including Eduard Buca, a Pole, and
Y. Hritsyiak, a Ukrainian – added more detail to the story.

New information has recently become available through more
systematic research and collection. In the past ten years, there has been a
dedicated effort by organizations in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – as well as
in Germany, Poland, the Ukraine and Italy – to document the experiences of their
nationals in the Gulag.10 These new accounts
have corroborated the essential version of the earlier accounts, while adding
more detail to make the story more complete. In all three Baltic countries more
accounts by former Baltic prisoners have been recently collected and published.
They have been very useful in describing important aspects of Gulag life. In
Russia – since the fall of Communism – for the first time articles and books on
the Gulag have appeared, but these are private efforts; and the Russian
government has chosen to avoid both the history of the Gulag and punishment of
those responsible for the crimes.

The research in this study is based on the memoirs of these
survivors, both Baltic and non-Baltic nationals, as well as on new documents
that are now available. It is also founded on the author’s interviews with
various survivors, including the Latvian prisoner Valentins Ozolins, and two
Catholic priests, the Latvian Viktors Pentjuss and the Lithuanian Francis
Raèiûnas.

Baltic Nationals in the Gulag

The first large group of Baltic nationals was sent to the Gulag in 1941, after
the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic States. Among them were military officers
from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, most of whom were sent to Norilsk. This was
the beginning of the arrest and deportation of Baltic nationals for the purpose
of forced labor. They were among other non-Russian nationalities of the western
USSR, including Poles, Belorussians, and Ukrainians who also suffered this fate.
They were sent to the Gulag primarily because the need for labor in the Gulag
system had become greater in wartime. After the war, the demand for labor was
still great, and in certain enterprises, such as atomic weapons development and
other secret research, it was of utmost importance. 11

Many Lithuanians and other Balts were imprisoned throughout
the vast expanse of the Gulag. There were heavy concentrations of them across
the entire northern part of European Russia including the Komi Republic camps of
Kotlas, Ukhta, Inta and Pechora that approach and surround Vorkuta. They came in
both the first deportation in 1941 and in the later deportations. They were made
to work in timbering and railroad construction, then for settlement construction
along the railroad. For example, 3,000 Lithuanians were brought to Kotlas in
1941. Others were in the Abez-Inta group about 150 to 200 miles west of Vorkuta
(coal mining, timbering, industrial prospecting for oil). Other Balts were
forced to the Ust-Ukhta group near Vorkuta, with about 30 camps, and the Ust-Vym
complex of 22 stations on the Vologda-Kotlas-Ukhta railroad line. There were
more in large-scale lumber transport on the Vym and Vchedga rivers. The Pechora
area had many camps in a region of dense forests. Pechora also contained a
transit prison that sent laborers to many sites, including Kozhva, Ukhta, and
Vorkuta.

With the second Soviet occupation of the Baltic States at
the end of World War II, a great number of Baltic citizens were forced into the
Gulag. This continued through the early 1950s, when another large group of
Baltic nationals were brought to these camps. These were young, patriotic Baltic
citizens, members of anti-Soviet partisan groups from all three Baltic states.
They, along with all of the Balts in the Gulag, were treated as political
prisoners sentenced under the comprehensive Article 58 of the USSR criminal
code. This statute had a broad category of alleged political crimes, such as
“betrayal of the fatherland.”12 In the camps,
they were all considered politicals, but the Soviet state did not recognize
political offenses. Instead, their actions were labeled “counterrevolutionary
crimes” or “dangerous state crimes.”

There was a conspicuous lack of legality to these arrests,
imprisonments and deportations. The basic problem was the application of Soviet
Law to occupied countries and the refusal of both the occupied peoples and the
international community to recognize their incorporation. Under international
law, deportation of a population in an occupied territory is forbidden. But even
aside from this issue, there was a lack of regular judicial process or proof of
guilt beyond the assertion of the secret police. Some prisoners, like the
Latvian Miervaldis Ravis, were actually put on trial in the place of deportation
itself. The trial took place before a special threeperson military tribunal in
the trial hall in Vorkuta. Ravis had no lawyer because “criminals under Article
58 are not expected to have lawyers represent them.” Ravis reported: “the
Vorkuta military prosecutor had authorized my arrest, based on the USSR criminal
code Article 58, for ‘military betrayal of the fatherland’.”13
The Latvian Valentins Ozolins, sentenced to 25 years when he was a 19-year-old
soldier in the Latvian military, said that he was tried on the basis of
testimony by someone who had never met him. Many of the imprisoned were sent
without any trial or legal proceeding other than an MVD directive or tribunal
decision made inabsentia.

There were cases where Baltic prisoners had been sentenced
to death but not executed because of the need for labor in the camps. Such was
the case of 500 Courland division officers whose death sentences were commuted
when they were sent to work in the Gulag.

Katorga

When the Communist prison system began in 1919, the prisoners were sent to camps
under the rubric of “corrective labor.” In April 1943, a Soviet ukaz
reestablished the concept of katorga – a particularly harsh regime camp (KTR).
The term comes from the classical Greek word for galley slaves rowing their
ships. These KTR camps were located in remote areas. The tsarist katorga was
abolished by the Provisional Government in 1917. It was now applied to grave
crimes, e.g., “betraying the Motherland,” but in reality lesser crimes were
classified as such offenses as well.

The Special Regime Camps of the GULAG

In early 1948, Stalin gave the MVD secret instructions to create a new category
of harsh camps. These were “special” forced labor camps, Spetslag, with
especially strict regimes for political (counterrevolutionary) prisoners.
Although located on the grounds of existing Gulag camps, they were separate and
isolated. They had their own administration, which was answerable to its own
authority in Moscow, and had their own special MGB guards. All prisoners in the
KTR were transferred to these special camps, where the prisoners worked at
especially difficult sites and tasks.

Although it may be hard to imagine, the conditions in these
camps were even more severe than the existing camps, which were already
inhumanely brutal. A particularly good account of the special regime horror is
given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Volume III of The Gulag Archipelago. In the
chapter entitled “Chains, Chains, Chains,” he tells how people were worked to
death or simply shot or punished at the whim of a guard. Sick prisoners lacked
adequate shoes or clothing. Inmates had to fill a daily work quota to get meager
food rations. They were crowded in filthy barracks. In the notorious Spassk camp
(part of Steplag) sixty prisoners dieddaily in summer while one hundred died
daily in winter, according to the tally of Estonians who worked in its morgue.14
Prisoners were allowed to receive only two letters a year; but even this was not
the norm, since most prisoners were not given their mail, which was censored and
at times destroyed or simply not delivered by the censors.

There were ten such special regime camps. Created in 1948,
they existed until the late 1950s (some even lasted until 1960). Their identity
was disguised by innocuous names that reflected their topographic location.
Their location was secret. They were:

Berlag: “shore camp,” the special camp of the Kolyma -
Magadan area (Dalstroi). Dubrovlag: “leafy grove camp,” in Mordovia with its
administrative center at Potma. Gorlag: “mountain camp,” created within the
Norilsk complex. Peschanlag: “sand camp,” located in Karaganda area, Kazakhstan,
included Ekibastusz. Rechlag: “river camp,” in the territory of Vorkuta, Komi
Republic. Minlag: “mineral camp” Inta, in the Komi Republic. Steplag: “steppe
camp,” area of Karaganda, Kazakhstan (Dzezhkazgan). Luglag: “meadow camp,” in
Karaganda area, Kazakhstan. Ozerlag: “lakeshore camp,” (Irkutsk-Lake Baikal),
set up within Taishet. Kamyshlag: “reed camp” was added in 1951, ”a secret
designation” for one of the special camps in the Kemerovo area of Siberia.

Ukrainian and Baltic nationals made up 40 percent of the
population of these camps.

The Karaganda Camps

The Karaganda region, located in Kazakhstan, held a vast number of camps. The
town of Karaganda was founded in 1929. It grew so rapidly so that by the 1950s
it was the second largest city in Kazakhstan. There were four special regime
camps in Kazakhstan: Peschanlag, Steplag, Luglag, and Kamyshlag. Peschanlag
consisted of a large complex, both in the immediate Karaganda area and beyond.
It had very rich coal resources. The Karaganda coal basin – part of the Kuznets
coal kombinat – occupies an area of 1,250 square miles and has many shafts. But
part of the camp complex from the start was agricultural in nature. Other camps
in the immediate Karaganda area included: Spassk (20 miles south), Dolinka,
Dubovka (16 miles west), Aktas (8 miles west) and Dzhumabek. Large numbers of
Balts were in all the camps. The first Baltic prisoners arrived in 1941, but
after World War II they came in large numbers.

Origins and Development of the Norilsk Camp Complex

Norilsk is the site of one of the richest mineral areas in the world. It holds
raw materials of great economic, industrial and military value, including
nickel, copper, cobalt, titanium, platinum, and palladium. The region contains
nineteen elements on the Periodic Table. It is located above the Arctic Circle
on the right bank of the Yenisey River. Developed and sustained by slave labor
it became one of the most valuable Gulag sites for the Soviet state It was, in
the words of historian Ainars Bambals: “the mother of peoples, the native place
of many nationalities and peoples, and the place of torment, degradation and
murder.”15 In 1953, the entire Norilsk region
was shaken by a prison uprising.

The Norilsk labor camp originated in 1936. It was a
corrective labor camp from the very start, with the administrative center in
Norilsk and a transit camp 60 kilometers west of Dudinka on the Yenisey. The
complex came to be known as Norillag. By 1940, the enterprise had grown to
twelve camps of varying size with more than 27,000 prisoners.

The complex proceeded to grow in size, but much of the work
was still done by primitive means. The second in command, Bulygin, said in a
meeting in 1940, “We cannot build the complex with horses. We lack
mechanization. We work like they worked 4,000 years ago in Assyria and
Babylonia.”16 The prisoners were transported via
barges on the Yenisey river to Dudinka, from where they marched by foot to the
camps. This was a most brutal and horrific method of transport – not only did
the imprisoned suffer immensely but many died in transit.

Working conditions in the frozen northern tundra were
immensely difficult. The NKVD was notorious for starting projects without
adequate study, preparation, equipment or clothing – in the worst climatic
conditions on earth! This resulted in great human loss and economic waste. To
dig in the frozen soil, prisoners had to use pickaxes heated in a bonfire but
could still only penetrate a few centimeters into the frozen earth; the work
results were meager and required extraordinary effort. If the quota was not met,
the prisoners did not get fed.17

After 1939, the composition of Norillag changed as the
number of criminal prisoners decreased in proportion to the political prisoners,
who became the majority of the slave labor force. The newcomers came from the
newly acquired regions of Soviet expansion: Western Ukraine, Poland, White
Russia and Finland and the Baltic states. There were all types of “political
prisoners” – people accused of being “Kirov assassins, murderer-doctors, agents
of imperialism” as well as those allegedly implicated in other “conspiracies”
fabricated by Stalin’s underlings.

The outbreak of World War II caused conditions in the camp
to worsen. Released workers were prevented from leaving until the end of the
war. The workday was extended by several hours, while the food ration was
reduced. Many prisoners had no contact with families, because the mail did not
arrive from the German-occupied territories.18

The complex contained the Dudinka-Norilsk railroad
maintenance unit, a copper factory, a nickel plant, a polymetallurgical factory,
a large mechanical factory, construction units, many laboratories, geological
expeditions, collective farms, and a central hospital as well as local camp
hospital units. It had its own thermoelectric station, which was a separate camp
unit. Many of these enterprises required educated people with good technical
knowledge, which included the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian military officers
deported in 1941, as well as Baltic intelligentsia deported later.

When the MVD initiated its “special strict regime” forced-labor
camps in the spring of 1948, such a camp system, Gorlag, was created here. In
1952, Norilsk officially had 68,489 prisoners of whom 20,1067 were in Gorlag.19
However, the Norilsk complex was larger. Rossi reports that by the late 1950s it
had about 100,000.20 Plus, the above figures do
not include the related camp complexes of Dudinka, Igarka, Dikson, Severnaya
Zemlya and Kharpich. Georg Csikos, a Hungarian prisoner in Norilsk, learned from
a veteran of the Dudinka transit camps that in the 1940s, in only four years,
half a million zeks (prisoners) had passed through the transit area on the way
to these camps.21

Vorkuta: Origins and Background

Vorkuta was a complex of forced-labor camps, comprising an area of 31 square
miles in the Komi Soviet Republic. It was one of the harshest and most notorious
camps in the Soviet Gulag. It is in the extreme northern part of European Russia
at the foot of the Urals, 40 kilometers northwest of the mountain range. Located
in the polar zone, 160 kilometers north of the Arctic circle, it lies just 90
kilometers from the Arctic Ocean. The average winter temperature is –40 C, while
the summer lasts just six weeks.

It is an historically inaccessible region that previously
had a sparse population of nomads. The camp was founded in 1931 for the purpose
of extracting coal. The first prisoners were brought in sleds from Archangelsk.
A railway built by slave laborers was finished in the late 1930s. Until 1940,
when horses were first brought in, all wagons were pulled by humans. Only slave
labor made it possible to develop the natural resources. A former prisoner has
described it as “a mill of human bones.”22

The Vorkuta complex in the 1950s consisted of about fifty
camps, most of which were coal mines. It had a special regime section
exclusively for political prisoners called Rechlag, which consisted of seventeen
divisions. Vorkuta was under the jurisdiction of the Soviet coal mining kombinat
known as Vorkutugol, a state business that operated in conjunction with
the MVD and the Soviet coal industry. Vorkuta is a prime example of how the
Stalinist system had created a Soviet economy dependent on slave labor. The
Vorkuta mines produced one-twelfth of the entire coal production of the USSR and
the entire supply for Leningrad. They were crucial to other Soviet industrial
centers as well.

The prisoners at Vorkuta represented dozens of different
nationalities with an estimated total prison population of about 200,000. There
were people from at least ninety nations. Since the late 1940s, the Ukrainians
were the largest single nationality, comprising nearly 50 percent. The next
largest group were the Balts, who made up about 30 percent. The prisoners worked
chiefly in the coal mines, but many were also assigned to work in support
facilities, including brick factories, power plants, railroad lines,
construction units, food transportation, prison help teams, and hospitals. The
brick kiln plants had a high concentration of Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian
women. There was an electric power plant and a disciplinary camp (62nd), both of
which had many prisoners from the Baltic states.23

The Number of Baltic Prisoners in the Camps

Determining the exact number of prisoners in the Gulag is very difficult because
of the confusing, complicated and at times unreliable records of the GULAG
bureaucracy. Efforts are now being made by researchers to provide more accurate
numbers, but so far the new data are not definitive. There were various
categories of prisoners and prison complexes. There were regular Gulag inmates,
both criminal and political; there were special regime inmates; there were
people deported to colonies; and there were the so-called “free workers,” –
prisoners released from Gulag camps but not free to return home. They either
settled in the area or were forced to relocate to other regions. Also, there was
“the atomic Gulag,” a super-secret network of forced labor camps for atomic
research and uranium mining supplied by the MVD.24
The number of prisoners in the atomic Gulag can only be estimated at present.

Baltic nationals were incarcerated in the Gulag in far
greater proportion than other nationalities. The researcher J. Otto Pohl says
that “in the early 1950s Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians continued to be
over-represented in the Gulag system. The overwhelming majority of prisoners
from these nationalities were incarcerated in camps rather than colonies. This
is because they were considered more dangerous than other groups.”25
Here are figures for Baltic prisoners in selected periods and certain camp
categories.

The number of Baltic prisoners in the Gulag ITLs
(corrective labor camps) was as follows:

In 1953, there were 218,142 people imprisoned in the
special camps. Ukrainian and Baltic nationals comprised 40 percent of the
population of these camps (87,794) while Russian political opponents represented
about one percent (Trotskyites, Bukharin, S-Rs and Whites).

In Rechlag (Vorkuta) in 1953, there were 37,067 prisoners:
33,265 men and 3,802 women. Almost one-third were sentenced to terms of 25
years. Balts constituted a significant part of the population. Together with the
Ukrainians, they comprised almost 50%.28 The
Lithuanians were the largest Baltic group. There were 10,495 Ukrainians, 2,935
Lithuanians, 1,521 Estonians, and 1,075 Latvians. But the entire Vorkuta complex
was far larger, holding more than 200,000 prisoners. The exact number of
Lithuanians in the Karaganda, Norilsk and Vorkuta complexes in 1953 is difficult
to determine. In addition to the above figures for Baltic citizens in the
corrective labor camps and special regime camps of the Gulag, we must add the
figures of those deported in 1949 to special settlements. Soviet mass
deportations from the Baltic States after 1945 resulted in many Baltic citizens
deported to special settlements. The figures for 1945 to 1949 were: Latvians
39,279; Lithuanians: 81,158; Estonians 19,520.29

Baltic People in the Camps: Life and Conditions

As they were arrested, deported and transferred to the Gulag, the Baltic
prisoners congregated in their own national groups. They also had a further
connection and identity as fellow Balts, which was noted in the memoirs of many
exprisoners. Baltic prisoners in the camps were noted for their solidarity,
solidarity, their industriousness and their patriotism. Many of their fellow
inmates speak of them with great respect. Solzhenitsyn (who was in Ekibastuz in
Karaganda province) says, “I found the Estonians and Lithuanians particularly
congenial. Although I was no better off than they were, they made me feel
ashamed, as though I were the one who had put them inside. Unspoiled,
hard-working, true to their word, unassuming – what had they done to be ground
in the same mill as ourselves. They had harmed no one, lived a quiet, orderly
life and a more moral life than ours – and now they were to blame because we
were hungry, because they lived cheek by jowl with us and stood in our path to
the sea.”30

While sentenced by the Soviet state as
“counter-revolutionaries” and generally regarded by the camp guards as
“fascists,” the Baltic prisoners were seen far differently in the eyes of fellow
prisoners.31 They were a cross-section of decent
Baltic citizenry and came from all social groups: civil officials, military
personnel, teachers, lawyers, writers, intellectuals, artists, doctors,
university professors, laborers, farmers, and workers. While she was in the Orel
hard labor camp in 1951, Helena Latkovska Wojtuskiewicz (a Polish citizen of
Latvian birth) expressed this aptly in describing the types of people imprisoned
as “enemies of the state.” She asked: “who were these ‘enemies of the country’
who were on our train from Riga? They were the Catholic pastor, Rev. Stanislas
Zeps, the head of the Latvian Music Conservatory, students, teachers,
secretaries, the young wife of a forest guard whose baby boy was born in prison
where he soon died, an old grandmother, Mrs. Novicka, and many other similar
people.”32

At Vorkuta, the Baltic prisoners were well organized and
presented a particular problem for the authorities. The Vorkuta commander, MVD
General Kuzma Derevianko, said the following about the Baltic prisoners: “The
Soviet authorities have no enemy so numerically small but yet so implacable in
their enmity as the Balts. We shall, however, see to it that this vermin
disappears from the face of the earth.”33

Solzhenitsyn talks about his interactions with the Balts.
He would read the news to them. “We were not left without news – they brought us
daily a sort of half-sized newspaper. I sometimes had the task of reading it
aloud to the whole cell and I read it with expression, for there were things
there which demanded it.”34

The tenth anniversary of the ‘liberation’ of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania came around just at this time. Some of those who
understood Russian translated for the rest. (I paused for them to do so),
and what can only be called a howl went up from the bed platforms as they
heard about the freedom and prosperity introduced into their countries for
the first time in history. Each of these Balts (and a good third of all
those in the transit prison were Balts) had left behind a ruined home and
was lucky if his family was still there and not on its way to Siberia with
another batch of prisoners.35

There were isolated cases where Balts had been compromised
and turned into informers. In the Rudnik camp of Dzezhkazgan in 1951, a
Lithuanian camp informant named Kozlauskas was killed by other prisoners.36

The American prisoner John Noble says that the Baltic
prisoners “had the strongest organizations (only a compatriot could share their
bacon) and the Russians the weakest... The MVD found it difficult to plant
informers among the Balts.”37 Scholmer noted
that the Lithuanian organization had its stock of bacon which it controlled
tightly. Generally the Balts received better food parcels from their families
than the Russians because of the higher standard of living. Scholmer states that
the Latvians were like the Ukrainians “politicals” in that they were opponents
of Communism because they had experienced it. He says that they knew too well
what it was like. In reference to the Latvians in the camps, Scholmer says that
among them was also “a high number of intelligentsia.” He also observed that
“the Estonians are as intransigent toward the Russians as the Latvians are.”38
The Balts had good relations with people of other nations, but they had little
to talk about with those who were real Soviet citizens because “their mentality
and outlook were foreign to us.”39

Baltic People and other Nationalities at Vorkuta

The prisoners at Vorkuta represented dozens of different nationalities. There
were people from at least ninety nations. During World War II and in the
immediate postwar period, there were many Russians, particularly former German
prisoners-of-war. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, large numbers of Ukrainians
and Baltic peoples, including many anti-Soviet partisans from these regions,
were sent to Vorkuta. Since the late 1940s the Ukrainians were the largest
single nationality, comprising nearly 50 percent. The next largest group were
the Balts who made up about 30 percent.

As in Norilsk, some Balts were first sent to Vorkuta in
1941, but with the second Soviet occupation of the Baltic States at the end of
World War II, they were deported there in far greater numbers. This continued
through the early 1950s. In 1953, another large group of Baltic nationals were
brought to Vorkuta. These were young anti-Soviet national partisans from all
three Baltic states.

There were Latvians in all of the Vorkuta mine-camps. In
Mine-camp No. 5, Janis Simsons40 says that there
were about fifty to sixty Latvians among the 3,000 prisoners. He says that this
was about the same number of Latvians as in other mine-camps. The total in each
camp fluctuated, depending on the number transferred to other camps, the number
sent in from elsewhere, and the number of deaths. Among the Latvians were some
with advanced education, including the Talsi city official Jansons, but most
were simply members of the Latvian Legion or ordinary farmers. Among the
Latvians, particularly outstanding were the former student and legionnaire
Zagars and Zanis Mentelis, the son of a Latvian university professor and
pogost official of the Auce region. In the camp, Zagars worked as a medical
assistant in the surgery unit and Mentelis as the medical assistant in the
tuberculosis unit. The legionnaire Skapars was in the same camp as Simsons. Camp
No. 5 also had about fifty Lithuanians, several dozen Estonians and about twenty
Volga Germans.41 The few Lithuanians with whom
Simsons had close contact were simple country folk.

Valentins Ozolins gives the number of Latvians in Camp No.
29 as 400. Latvians in Vorkuta came from all professions and occupations: there
were doctors, farmers, police, accountants, engineers bookkeepers, pogost
officials, professors, and border guards.

There was great hostility between the Russian guards and
the Ukrainians, whom they derided as Banderists. Buca also reports tension
between the Russian prisoners and the others, especially the Ukrainians. “One
result of our desperate condition was increased hatred and strife between the
different nationalities, with each group trying to blame another for our plight.
The basic conflict was between Russians and Ukrainians. The Russians regarded
the Ukrainian nationalists and separatists as the real guilty men, and it was a
kind of consolation to them to say that the Ukrainians were the real criminals
who should be made to suffer for their sins. ...The Russian prisoners had picked
up these ideas from the NKVD officers and guards.”42

Among the prominent Balts in Vorkuta was the Lithuanian A.
Kazanas described by Buca as “a former army officer, old-fashioned and fair
minded, ... he was popular with his fellow Balts, but did not mix with Russians,
Ukrainians or Poles.”43 During the revolt, he
told his compatriots, “I am an old man, you can count on me. He agreed to keep
order among his fellow Balts.”

How and why the Baltic prisoners were sentenced is an issue
that needs investigation. All were sentenced under Article 58. Apparently many
were under the special tribunal of the MVD. The MVD arrested a person, tried
him, and then put him in the camps, where they placed him at forced labor and
guarded him. Some of the prisoners, like Ravis, were actually put on trial in
Vorkuta. His trial took place before a special three-person military tribunal in
the trial hall in Vorkuta. Ravis had no lawyer because he was told “criminals
under Article 58 are not expected to have lawyers representing them.” Ravis
said: “The Vorkuta military prosecutor had authorized my arrest, based on the
USSR Criminal Code Article 58 for “military betrayal of the fatherland.”44
Ozolins, who was sentenced for 25 years, said that he was tried on the basis of
testimony by someone who had never met him. Many were tried in absentia or
secretly.

Baltic Women in the Camps

Women from the Baltic States were in all of the camps where the revolts took
place. They also took an active part in the revolts, with Latvian Alida Dauge in
Norilsk the best example. In one of the women’s camps, there were 1,500 inmates
in the early 1950s. The Baltic women (and Ukrainian women) had been imprisoned
for alleged collaboration with partisans and were given 10- to 25-year terms.
While there were Baltic women who supported the national partisans, the Gulag
was filled with women who were imprisoned for trivial or unintentional acts.
They lived in barracks of about 75 women in each unit. There were at least 800
Lithuanian women in Vorkuta.45 Women worked at
“road construction and repair, street paving, railroad car loading, etc.”
Everything was done manually. For example, a fifty-ton railroad car had to be
unloaded in four hours by 26 women.46

Baltic Cooperation

Simsons says: “We, all of the Latvians in camp, as well as other Balts,
frequently congregated and discussed, each in our native tongue, interesting
topics.”47 John Noble reports a restriction on
groups of five gathering, but Simsons did not experience this. Simsons says that
the Baltic prisoners shied away from the “red corner” reading room because they
viewed it with great suspicion. Simsons and the others regularly read the
regional paper Za Novi Sever and as well as Pravda and other Moscow
newspapers. Two of the Latvian prisoners regularly received issues of Cina
and Padomju Jaunatne from Latvia. These newspapers were passed around
from person to person and were read with great interest because they were the
only means of receiving information about the native land for the Latvian
inmates. Almost everyone received letters from relatives in Latvia, but these
letters dealt only with family matters.48

Balts and Religion in the Gulag

In addition to its spiritual function, for the Balts, especially Latvians and
Lithuanians, religion played an important political and social role in the
camps. (This was also notable among Poles and Ukrainians). For these groups,
religious expression was a practice that became more vital in detention and
which they maintained secretly and under great difficulty. The practice of
religion in the Gulag was forbidden, so essentially this was done only through
great secrecy or sometimes with the tacit approval of the guards. The
prohibition and punishment varied among the guards. There were many clergy from
all over the USSR (and even foreign lands) imprisoned in the camps as part of
the general prisoner population. They represented many different faiths. There
were many Catholic and Lutheran clergy from the Baltic states in the Gulag. In
the early 1950s in Vorkuta alone, there were five Latvian Catholic priests,
approximately that many Lithuanian Catholic priests and several Latvian Lutheran
ministers, including Pauls Rozenbergs, Janis Udris and Augusts Alers.49
Viktors Pentjuss said that in Vorkuta he and several Lithuanian priests would
hold regular religious services secretly for the Catholics, especially the Balts.

Catholic nuns from Lithuania as well as many from the
Ukraine and Poland were also imprisoned in the camps where they joined Russian
Orthodox nuns who had been deported to the camps earlier. Solzhenitsyn says that
one camp was composed of at least one-third nuns. Many of the prisoners spoke of
the bravery and superhuman religious dedication of the sisters. Rossi said that
“a nun is a great example of great moral steadfastness and physical endurance.”50

For the non-Russian prisoners, religion was also a part of
their sense of national identity. “Celebrating holy days according to their
specific rites... meant underlining a distinct nationality, belonging to a
particular community and manifesting one’s own patriotic sentiments. The members
of the clergy thus became important reference points for the national
communities in the camps.”51 For the
Lithuanians, the Catholic priests were very active in tending to the religious
needs of prisoners. Among Latvians, there were Catholic priests in various
camps, including five at Vorkuta, and also Lutheran ministers for Latvians. The
clergy would perform services on a regular basis as well as special feast days.
They would hold the services in remote parts of coal mines or in forest areas or
in barracks, with sentries posted to warn of guards.

Latkovska-Wojtuskiewicz said: “I left myself completely in
God’s hands... I had no other interest except to keep up the spirit of the other
prisoners... Now all that remained was to concentrate my thoughts on my Redeemer
and participate in my fate with others like me.”52

in the Kuibyshev transit prison I saw Catholics
(Lithuanians) busy making themselves rosaries for prison use. They made them
by soaking bread, kneading beads from it, coloring them (black ones with
burnt rubber, white ones with tooth powder, red ones with red germicide),
stringing them while still moist on several strands of thread twisted
together and thoroughly soaped, and letting them dry on the window ledge. I
joined them and said that I, too, wanted to say my prayers with a rosary,
but that in my particular religion, I needed one hundred beads in a ring
(later, when I realized that twenty would suffice and indeed be more
convenient, I made them myself from cork), that every tenth bead must be
cubic and not spherical, and that the fiftieth and the hundredth must be
distinguishable by touch. The Lithuanians were amazed by my religious zeal
(the most devout among them had no more than forty beads), but with true
brotherly love helped me put together a rosary such as I had described,
making the hundredth bead in the form of a dark-red heart. I never afterward
parted with this marvelous present of theirs; I fingered and counted my
beads inside my wide mittens – at work lineup, on the march to and from
work, at all waiting times; I could do it standing up, and the freezing cold
was no hindrance. I carried it safely through the search points in the
padding of my mittens, where it could not be felt. The warders found it on
various occasions, but supposed that I was praying and let me keep it. Until
the end of my sentence (by which time I had accumulated 12,000 lines) and
after that in my place of banishment, this necklace helped me to write and
remember.53

The Lithuanian women observed their national customs...
They also celebrated Christmas and Easter by taking the traditional meals
together.54 There were, however, many times when
it was impossible to mark a religious feast. For instance, in the Orel prison,
Latkovska-Wojtuskiewicz described the scene at Easter in 1951 as “a veritable
hell: the room was full of people, half-naked women languished and we, the new
arrivals, wallowed on filthy straw, from which rose a stinking dust which choked
one’s breath. We were so hoarse we could neither breathe nor speak.”55

Unrest in the Camps: The Increase of Revolts after
World War II

The story of the Gulag revolts is very sketchy, but there were rebellions from
the very beginning, starting with uprisings in Solovki. There were some camp
revolts in the 1930s, for instance in Kolyma in 1936, in Vorkuta and in Dalstroi
in 1937 and in Vorkuta again in 1939. In 1942, during World War II, there was a
legendary rebellion in the Ust-Usa camp of the Vorkuta complex.56
In the wartime period there were rebellious actions by Baltic prisoners. In
Usolsk, a group of Estonians had organized to take control of the camp and
attempted to establish contact with the German military. In Norilsk, in 1944, a
group of Latvians and others staged a hunger strike. Unrest in the Gulag camps
became more frequent after World War II. A major revolt in Vorkuta in 1947 could
only be put down with the help of airplanes.

The creation of the “special regime” camps increased the
number of revolts. Silde describes numerous revolts in his study of the Gulag.57
Solzhenitsyn devotes much of his third volume of The Gulag Archipelago to the
prisoner rebellion against the system. Anne Applebaum cites the following as
only a few examples of the growing unrest: “an armed uprising in Kolyma in the
winter of 1949-1950; an armed escape from Kraslag in March 1951; mass hunger
strikes in Ukhtizhemlag and Ekibastuzlag, in Karaganda, later in 1951; and a
strike in Ozerlag in 1952.”58 Documents show the
Gulag hierarchy’s knowledge of the growing restiveness of prisoners in the
camps. Applebaum characterized it thus:

The Gulag’s Moscow bosses were well aware of
dissatisfaction and unrest within the camps too. By 1951, mass work
refusals, carried out by both criminal and political prisoners, had reached
crisis levels, in that year, the MVD calculated that it had lost more than a
million workdays due to strikes and protests. In 1952 that number doubled.
According to the Gulag’s own statistics, 32 percent of prisoners in the year
1952 had not fulfilled their work norms. The list of major strike and
protest actions in the years 1950 to 1952, kept by the authorities
themselves, is surprisingly long.59

The camps were increasingly difficult to control. Applebaum
says: “So bad had the situation become that in January 1952, the commander of
Norilsk sent a letter to General Ivan Dolgikh, then the Gulag’s commander in
chief, listing the steps he had taken to prevent rebellion.60

Clandestine Organizations

In the postwar years, the Gulag was filled with younger anti-Soviet national
guerrilla fighters, as well as landowners who were dispossessed in the
collectivization. The Karaganda, Norilsk and Vorkuta camps like others received
many of these new prisoners. The new forced laborers created their own networks
in the camps and maintained a national solidarity. Solzhenitsyn commented that
this created a new dynamic because “other forms of human association now bound
people more closely together than the work teams artificially put together by
the administration. Most important were national ties.” Applebaum says: “In the
case of both Rechlag (Vorkuta) and Gorlag (Norilsk), memoirs and archives agree
that those in charge (to the extent that anyone was in charge) were almost
always Western Ukrainians, Poles and Balts”.61

Origin of the 1953 Revolts: Unrest in Karaganda

Karaganda, located in Kazakhstan, was the focal point of the unrest in the Gulag
system in the early 1950s. Uprisings occurred in various Karaganda camps in late
1952 and continued into 1953. It was the transfer of restive prisoners from
Karaganda to Norilsk and Vorkuta that combined with brewing unrest in those
camps to explode into major revolt.

The Karaganda Gulag network consisted of camps both within
the immediate area of the city as well as in the surrounding region. Four
“special regime” camps were created there: Steplag, Peschanlag, Luglag and
Kamyshlag. There were prisoners of various nationalities in these camps, but
there was a particularly high percentage of Ukrainians and Baltic nationals.
Area camps included Spassk, 30 kilometers south; Dolinka, a few kilometers
southeast; Dubovka, 22 kilometers west; Aktas, 12 kilometers west; and
Dzhumabeck. Other camps of the Karaganda network – but farther from Karaganda –
were Ekibastuz, about 400 kilometers to the east, and Dzezhkazgan, which is
about 250 kilometers west. Dzezhkazgan was the administrative center of the
Karaganda Area Camp Administration.

There are reports that there was also another “special
regime” camp in Karaganda: Karlag, also known as Karlag 246. Its administrative
center was Dolinka. As of 1951, it was for political prisoners only. Karlag 246
had a prisoner population of about 30,000, with a high proportion of women – 40
percent.62

Karaganda had several women’s camps. Martha Chyz reported
that one of them was known as “the Wives Camp” (for married women) because of
the large number of wives of the so-called “enemies of the people.” The
notorious Spassk camp complex had a women’s camp where 2,800 women worked at
construction of houses, as well as in quarries, and in the fields.”63
There were also women’s camps in Kengir and Balkash, where the prisoners worked
in sawmills and quarries.64

An uprising in Ekibastuz in 1952 reported by Solzhenitsyn
in The Gulag Archipelago was one of several in this period.65
A Karaganda uprising occurred in April 1953. This was larger than previous
uprisings there in 1947 and 1951. Shifrin also reported a strike in Dzezhkazgan
in 1953.

Kengir is most famous for the massive strike in 1954
(vividly described by Solzhenitsyn “Forty Days of Kengir”,66
but a year before, a major protest erupted there in the middle of May. It
developed as a confrontation with guards, when the prisoners began to eliminate
suspected spies in the camps. On May 16, the prisoners started a strike (which
lasted three days) because a drunken guard had killed several inmates.

A participant, the Hungarian physician Dr. Fedor Varkony,
reported that a year before the Great Uprising, on May 16, 1953, the prisoners
of the Kengir camp were fired upon by automatic weapons without any cause, while
they were returning from work. The following day, May 17, the prisoners refused
to go to work and demanded that the guards guilty of the shooting, in which four
persons lost their lives, be severely punished. The strike was not well prepared
and it was broken in three days. The strike organizers and the more active
strikers, 300 in number, were put under investigation and arrest.67
In spite of the arrests, the significance of the prisoners’ protests was that
they forced the authorities to negotiate before returning to work.68
There was more unrest a few months later. In July, a woman was killed by shots
from a watchtower for allegedly entering into the prohibited zone. The results
were the same as those following the earlier killings of four prisoners: strikes
and work stoppages.69

Of the 8,000 inmates in the four camp divisions at
Kingir, more than half were Ukrainians, and about one-fourth were Russians.
Veterans from World War II played a major role in the (1954) uprising.
...Most of the protests in 1953 and 1954 took place in Camp No. 3, adjacent
to Kingir’s maximum security prison.70

After being offered concessions, including the granting of
some of their demands, the strikers still refused to end their protest. They
insisted on putting their demands directly to a member of the government or of
the Central Committee. These demands were: a review of the sentences handed down
to political prisoners, to be undertaken, not by the MVD, but rather by members
of the Ministry of Justice; the granting of freedom, both to members of the
Ukrainian, Belorussian, Moldavian and Baltic nationalist organizations, and also
to those prisoners who were “victims of the Second World War” (i.e., those
imprisoned by Germans in concentration camps, who, on their return to the Soviet
Union, were given long sentences for espionage or “betraying the nation”).71

Prisoner Transfers

In an attempt to control the unrest in Karaganda, the Gulag authorities moved
the prisoners to other camps, most notably Norilsk and Vorkuta. Transfer and
dispersal were tactics used previously to attempt to disrupt networks and
prevent collusion. In the fall of 1952, the Gulag administration transferred
1,200 Ukrainian and Baltic prisoners.72

In October 1952, a group of Ukrainian and Baltic prisoners
were taken from Peschanlag (Karaganda) to Norilsk.73
Anne Applebaum reports: “Many have seemed to have been involved in the armed
escape attempts and protests that had taken place there a few months earlier.
All were imprisoned for ‘revolutionary activity’ in the Western Ukraine and
Baltic States.”74 Their activism was shown in
that they had already organized clandestine organizations as they were being
transferred. The MVD reported them to be involved in “organizing a revolutionary
committee even as they were being transferred to Norilsk.”75
Silde was one of the first to identify this Soviet mistake: “The surviving
leaders of the Karaganda mutiny were transferred to Vorkuta. In this, the
Bolsheviks committed an error; in Vorkuta these anti-Soviet fighters told about
this heroic struggle against the oppressor in Karaganda, thus inspiring the
Vorkuta internees to fight for their honor and freedom.”76
In February 1953, 1,000 Ukrainian prisoners were transferred from Kamyshlag to
Rechlag.77

March to June 1953: Events Influencing the Revolts

In addition to the long-term factors, in 1953 there were many significant events
that contributed to the outbreak of the revolts in Norilsk and Vorkuta. The
first of these was Stalin’s sudden death in March, followed by the June 17
uprising in East Germany and shortly thereafter the arrest and removal of Beria.
In April, an uprising erupted at Karaganda, followed by the Norilsk revolt from
May to August. Unrest in Karaganda actually dated back to late 1952. The
Karaganda disturbances affected both Norilsk and Vorkuta because some of the
rebels from Karaganda were transferred to these two camp complexes. In Vorkuta,
the news about the East Germans and Beria virtually coincided with the arrival
of prisoners from Karaganda. The death of Stalin had brought hope of changes
that did not come. There was an amnesty for certain Gulag prisoners declared by
the Soviet Presidium on March 27,1953, but it applied only to the criminals,
leaving the politicals frustrated.

Other factors in the revolts were the presence of many more
political prisoners in the camps, particularly the very active Ukrainians and
the Balts. The recent arrival of larger numbers of these groups in the Gulag was
significant. There already were Ukrainian and Baltic nationals in the Gulag
camps, but after 1949 their numbers increased and were reinvigorated by newly
arrived national partisans.

These non-Russian groups organized themselves very well.
They functioned as institutions of solidarity as well as secret nationalist
organizations in the camps. They were not only able to survive better than
previous prisoner groups, but they tried various forms of resistance and some
were preparing for a chance to revolt. All of the above factors combined with
existing grievances in making the revolt.

The unrest in Karaganda began in late 1952 and smoldered
until April 1953. This was larger than previous uprisings there in 1947 and
1951. Applebaum says that many of the activist prisoners “were involved in armed
escape attempts and protests” and were transferred elsewhere over the following
months. About 1,200 were moved to Norilsk (the Gorlag “special regime” camp).
She says they all had been sent to the Gulag for “revolutionary activity in the
Western Ukraine and the Baltic States.”78 They
even had continued to organize revolutionary plans while being transferred to
Norilsk.

Unrest in the Spassk Women’s Camp

Spassk was a large camp of 15,000 prisoners twenty miles from Karaganda.
Solzhenitsyn gives it special mention as a particularly brutal camp.79
In the women’s camp in 1953 there were more than 200 Lithuanians, 120 Latvians
and 40 Estonians. All were political prisoners. It was separated from the
adjacent men’s camp by a high wall. Communication between the two camps was
conducted by rocks thrown over the wall with messages attached. This message
system kept the prisoners informed of both local as well as national and
international events. From nearby hill it was possible to observe events in both
camps. The barracks were made of clay and straw. Women camp officials and female
MVD officers kept very strict control.

There was a fight between criminals and the politicals
(Ukrainians):

MVD units, with machine guns and tanks, were summoned
and killed several hundred prisoners in a fierce clash. Among the dead were
80 or 82 women – the uprising had been particularly violent in the Karaganda
women’s camp, where an open defiance of death was shown.”80